Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Poetry (and Everything Else), but Were Afraid to Ask.

Entries categorized "sonnets"

December 28, 2014

Sorry if I'm taking liberties with that salutation, but it's a habit Moira Egan and I got into among ourselves when working with our Hot Sonnets anthology. I hope you're taking note of the rave reviews it continues to get and are aware that the book is being used in numerous college classrooms—doubtless improving the class atmosphere and temperature.

Here's my idea: I'd like to look at another "something hot" from you — specifically, a recipe or description of a dish — for possible use in a piece of fiction I'm working on. It stars Simone Stiles, a Johns Hopkins PhD drop-out who is becoming famous for her erotic cookbooks, including Orgasmic Organics, Smokin’ Loins and Buggery (this last about making yummy and/or aphrodisiac edibles out of stuff — not excluding bugs — which people find yucky. (Of course that makes way for all sorts of oysters, ocean- and mountain.)

The epigraph for Simone's abandoned PhD dissertation, by the way, is Mark Strand's "Eating Poetry." Thanks to Moira, Strand has already given me permission to quote it in the story. Since I'm rather fond of fiction which contains some non-fictitious people (Thomas Pynchon liked it too), I'm hoping to include Moira, Hot Sonnets (surely it was a source of inspiration to Simone), and some food fun from real-life contributors to the anthology.

So: how about sending me a recipe or just a description of a dish which is somehow "hot"— in the sexy sense or the double entendre sense? Or something for Buggery which uses ingredients that many find repellent but produce something delicious?

If you do send, please include a few of your own words characterizing the dish and also let me know whether you'd be OK with my using your actual name in the story or would prefer me to characterize you simply as "one of the famous poets from the anthology."

Here's an example of what I had in mind: Ilse Munro, wonderful writer and online editor of Little Patuxent Review, sent me a recipe for a Latvian aspic from pig-parts-broth, pointing out that its gelatinous quivering upon the platter "can be quite suggestive." I have a few recipes of my own which involve possibilities during the cooking process, and Simone particularly likes this kind of recipe for her barbecue book (Smokin’ Loins). In fact, there are a number of poems about sexy cooking in Hot Sonnets. You might be willing to let me quote some tidbits even if you don't have an actual recipe to send.

Don't think about this too hard. Just let your mind riffle freely and a bit raunchily through your cookery file and your poem file and hit “Reply.” I would like to have your contribution by Thanksgiving, which is just around the corner. (I guess turkey giblets qualifies — do you do anything interesting with giblets? Ever nibbled leftover candied yams in bed w/a friend?) Also, please understand that the story, even if it develops into a novella, may not provide room for all recipes received.

Off to tend the tongue simmering on my stove as I write—

Clarinda

"Three Recipes" first appeared in The Critic, xxvii:1, Aug.-Sep., 1968;

"Sherried Artichoke Chicken" was anthologized in John Keats's Porridge, edited by Victoria McCabe, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1975.

Lew,

These are a marvel! Thank you, thank you! I imagine Simone will be quoting from all three, though I personally think #1 is the sexiest (despite the painful idea of hatching an artichoke). Since her public name, Simone Stiles, is one she made up in homage to another exhibitionist, Simon Stylites, she will probably want to use both your names.

Hmmm. Perhaps she'll start on another book, Carousing (only recipes using booze), Savagery (wild game cooking, which really, there is, in real life, a need for), or maybe Drinking with Savages (booze and wild game) or (but no, I can hardly bring myself to type it) Soread-Eagled (devoted to stuffings).

I am so grateful! And btw, these are three of my favorite Turco/Court poems.

Clarinda

Glad you're happy with them, Clarinda,

Though they were published in the 'sixties, and one of them was even anthologized, they were lost for years until I reacquired them by writing to a library for a photocopy; they've never been collected. I remember writing them from recipes I saw in a women’s magazine my wife had.

November 29, 2014

Over the weekend of September 22-23 2012 Robert Mezey wrote me as follows:

"Dear Lew,

"Here’s an invented form, and certainly odd, that I’ve never seen or heard of before. An old student of mine has taken my sonnet "Hardy" and written another poem using exactly the same words. I don’t know whether she has given it a name—I seem to recall her saying something about “recombinant” (as in DNA?) Anyway, her poem surprised me; it seemed much better than I thought it would be. You might be interested in it for your collection."

September 12, 2014

On the seventh of July, 2012, I received this message from the poet Ned Balbo, one of whose students was working on a review of Annabelle Moseley’s first book The Clock of the Long Now (David Roberts Books, 2011). Ned wanted to document whether the “mirror sonnet” form had a preexisting history or was the author’s innovation. He provided a link: Verse Wisconsin 108 | Annabelle Moseley versewisconsin.org.

“Could you confirm whether, to the best of your knowledge, it's ‘hers’? I haven't seen other examples of it, but my knowledge isn't as exhaustive as yours.

“Thanks!”

Ned Balbo

At first glance I thought that what Ms. Moseley had done was to write two sonnets using the rhyme scheme of the first sonnet backwards in the second sonnet, which was an idea that didn’t impress me much because the idea would simply double all forms, and people could then write "mirror terzanelles," "mirror sestinas" and so forth and claim they had "invented" the form(s). But a second glance showed me that the poem is much more clever than I had surmised on first reading. Ms. Moseley actually had written the second sonnet backward line by line, using the same lines as in the first sonnet, so that it made sense! The system got her into a few awkward spots, but it worked. It reminded me a bit of one of the poems I used in last week’s “Form of the Week 4: Paren(t)hesis” titled "Time Goes Down in Mirrors." Those who are interested might take a look at "Paren(t)hesis" again.

Ned wrote back, “Thanks very much for your help, Lew…I'll recommend that the reviewer give Annabelle credit. I like the poem and think the form would be fun to try.”

I replied, “All poems are nonce forms the first time they're written, and they remain nonce forms until other people use them. Has anyone else ever written a ‘mirror sonnet’?”

Ned said, “If they have, I don't know about it. Annabelle may be the first.”

“Then it's still just a nonce poem,” I said, and all Annabelle had done was to invent a form for her personal use, just as John Berryman wrote poems in the form he invented, the “dreamsong,” a description of which will be found on page 193 of The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised and Expanded Fourth Edition. However, the “mirror sonnet” is quite a clever idea, and perhaps others would like to try the form. The rhyme scheme is simply that of the English sonnet, ababcdcdefefgg —ggfefedcdcbaba and, of course, the meter is iambic pentameter. More on the sonnet form is on pp. 353-357 of The Book of Forms cited above.

May 09, 2013

Long before it was fashionable I was a devotee of
recycling material, in particular writing I had done earlier and that I felt
could be updated and improved — well, maybe
improved. For instance, the earliest creative material I ever published in a
professional journal was “My Father and I,” a short story that I entered in a
contest for high school students sponsored by a local newspaper — I don’t
recall whether it was the Morning Record
or the evening Journal — in Meriden,
Connecticut, during the summer of 1949 when I was fifteen years old and about
to enter Meriden High School. It was a
very corny piece of work, of course, about a fishing trip that a boy (not me)
took with his father (not mine: he was a preacher and didn’t fish except for
souls), but it won third prize. Many years later I rewrote it and used it as a
portion of “The Gunner’s Story” which was part of a fictive trilogy titled
“Shipmates,” published in the Spring 1978 issue of The Colorado-North Review where it was transformed from a hunk of
sentimental goop into a horrendous death scene. The story was included in my
book titled The Museum of Ordinary People
in 2008.

Of the three poems titled “Venal Songs,” below, the
first one, “Selene,” was originally written while I was serving after high
school as an enlisted man in the U. S. Navy during the early 1950s. Titled “Endymion” at first, it was composed
as a triversen, a form invented and often used by William Carlos Williams that
calls for variable accentual prosody and no rhymes at all. It was first
published in The American Scholar in
1962.

The second poem, “Leola,” was written at about the
same time and in the same form. It appeared in The Midwest Quarterly in 1960.

“Venus,” the third poem, was written as a “free
verse” prose poem at about the same time, but it didn’t appear in a journal
until 1966 when it was used by American
Weave, a Cleveland publication. All these poems appeared in their original
forms in a hectographed typescript titled Day
After History that I had bound in Washington, D. C., where I was stationed
at the Bureau of Naval Personnel, and gave to a dozen friends when I was
discharged in 1956.

All three poems were rewritten as sonnets much later
— I don’t remember exactly when. They appeared in their current form in Maine Taproot: An Anthology of Verse
Edited by Margaret Rockwell Finch and others, published by the Maine Poets
Society in 2010; “Venus” also appeared as “Venal Song,” in Hot Sonnets
edited by Moira Egan and Clarinda Harriss, from Entasis Press in 2011:

VENAL
SONGS

A Choker
of Sonnets

I. Selene

You've lost at this game of love, Endymion,

And so have I.
The forfeiture is steep

For those who would contend. Selene has won.

One seldom wins at last, for it is sleep

That triumphs after all. There is your vale,

Endymion: you slumber while the hounds

Hunt their quarry.
Your mistress will prevail

At masques and balls. She makes her evening rounds

While you pursue your dreams. She knows that sport

Is in the sap and blood of spring, not shadow.

Selene will choose the quick for her consort,

The play of moonlight in a summer meadow.

Will you dream on, Endymion, to rue

The pulsing game your mistress offers you?

II. Leola

It goes away, Leola, as the rabble

Hooves have gone.
The prairies linger. None,

No, none may know the stallion with his sable

Mane for long, nor his desire. Gone

Are the souls of brontosaurs; they’ve run

Their feather courses long ago, Leola.

This is true, though: oceans dwell as one

Among the continents. Look through a hollow

Rush, Leola: sight is vaguely dry

And limited, although the hint of light

Arrows down the reed to meet the eye

And pierce the iris in its yoke of white.

Put down the hollow reed now. Let it be.

Peer through your flesh or mine. What do you see?

III. Venus

Hour on hour I've wandered Venus' arbor

Looking for the sun. All I encounter

Is dappled leaves and lichen. In her bower

She stands disarmed. Each time I try to mount her

I fall unmembered to the harlot moss,

The victim of her concrete passion, dazzled

And confused.
I try to fit my loss

Into her cross words, but my mind is puzzled —

Incomplete and wretched intellect

Is hardly help at all. Before the tomb

Of love I stand and pray to be elect,

To be at one with her in her blue womb,

For there at least and last I could not fault her,

And I'd have no more reason to assault her.

Alas! and alack thereof, I am constrained to say
that the only one of these three sonnets that is an improvement over its
original is the third one.

The
editors of, and some of the contributors to Hot
Sonnets will read poems from the anthology at the Exploring Form and
Narrative Poetry Conference of the West Chester University in Pennsylvania on
Wednesday, June 8th, 2013, from 10:00 to 11:30 a.m.

June 27, 2011

Hot Sonnets offers proof positive that rumors of the death of the sonnet have been greatly exaggerated. In fact, in the warm and capable hands of these practitioners, it’s clear that the sonnet is still as relevant (and sexy, serious, mordant, amusing, scintillating, sizzling) as a poem can be.

You know, dugongs were
mermaids, and sailors still sing this (DUGONG) SEASONG:

The Marinated Mackerel
splashed

To aid the mermaid in
distress.

He bubbled nothings in
her gill

Till blushingly she
burbled, "Yes!"

The Mackerel's now
father of

A motley, marinated crew
—

His mermaid murmurs on a
reef,

Abiding cordially for
you!

All of which would
indicate,

True love should never
marinate.

Wes

A steep price to pay! :)

Alice

Great job, Lew.

As always, thanks for
reminding us of and bringing new life to forms that are so often neglected in
this formless age of txt msging! And not just a sonnet but terza rima!! Ritorni
al grande maestro, Dante!

The Virginia Quarterly Review"The Mutable Past," a memoir collected in FANTASEERS, A BOOK OF MEMORIES by Lewis Turco of growing up in the 1950s in Meriden, Connecticut, (Scotsdale AZ: Star Cloud Press, 2005).

The Tower JournalTwo short stories, "The Demon in the Tree" and "The Substitute Wife," in the spring 2009 issue of Tower Journal.

The Tower JournalMemoir, “Pookah, The Greatest Cat in the History of the World,” Spring-Summer 2010.

The Michigan Quarterly ReviewThis is the first terzanelle ever published, in "The Michigan Quarterly Review" in 1965. It has been gathered in THE COLLECTED LYRICS OF LEWIS TURCO/WESLI COURT, 1953-2004 (www.StarCloudPress.com).

The Gawain PoetAn essay on the putative medieval author of "Gawain and the Green Knight" in the summer 2010 issue of Per Contra.